There are many tips for great portrait photography and a few of them will be given in this article. Keep in mind that these ideas and tips will be making you think a bit outside of the box and therefore may be a bit unconventional.
Something that is normal for all photographers to do is to take pictures at eye level with the model either looking straight ahead or perhaps looking off to the side. Something you may not have thought about when doing portrait photography is to change your perspective a bit by taking the photos from a different angle. For example, have your model to sit down on a big fluffy pillow and you go upstairs or stand on something that makes you higher up than your model, then you can shoot the picture from above and having the model looking up. This can create a wow factor that is generally not captured in most portrait photography. Another way to create a similar wow factor in your portrait photography is to get down lower than your model and take the photo looking up at them.
One good tip for “out of the box” portrait photography is to have your model looking at someone or something other than your camera lens. This can create beautiful pictures that are not quite as conventional as typical portrait photography. Yet another cool idea for non-typical portrait photography is to shoot your model off center. Most portraits are dead on straight centered, but what if you were to make your photo be only half of the models face or all of their face but just all the way to the left of the picture. This is a great way to add depth to the picture and make it a bit more creative than typical portrait photography.
You can do a lot for a photo by playing with the lighting of it and how it hits the models face. You can use side lighting, backlighting, and silhouetting to name of few of the thousands of things you can do with lighting to make your portrait photography come alive. Lighting has endless possibilities on how you can affect your finished product.
There are many other ideas for portrait photography that you may have seen done such as having the subjects jump and getting the picture while they are in mid air. These types of pictures can be very hard to get exactly right, but once you do they are quite fun. They are not only fun to look at, but are quite fun for the models to do as well. As you can see there are many ideas and ways to take the typical portrait photography session from boring to wow.
